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Ross Douthat

New Year’s resolution: Read some commentary from the other side

I’m using the word “subscription” advisedly: it may sound fusty in the age of blogs and tweets and online hopscotching, but reading the entirety of a magazine, whether in print or on your tablet, is a better way to reckon with the ideas that its contributors espouse than just reading the most-read or most-e-mailed articles on its Web site, or the occasional inflammatory column that all your ideological compatriots happen to be attacking.

So if you love National Review’s political coverage, add The New Republic or The Nation to your regular rotation as well. If you think that The New Yorker’s long-form journalism is the last word on current affairs, take out a Weekly Standard subscription and supplement Jeffrey Toobin with Andy Ferguson, Adam Gopnik with Christopher Caldwell. If you’re a policy obsessive who looks forward every quarter to the liberal-tilting journal Democracy, consider a subscription to the similarly excellent, right-of-center National Affairs. And whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say.

Second, expand your reading geographically as well as ideologically. Even in our supposedly globalized world, place still shapes perspective, and the fact that most American political writers live in just two metropolitan areas tends to cramp our ability to see the world entire.

Blowback

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All I need to know about leftism is that it’s the poisonous philosophy whose adherents are currently trying to destroy everything I hold dear. No amount of sophistry is going to change the fact that freedom, for example, is a good thing in and of itself.

I take one for the team and listen to NPR. It only burns for a little while, then I switch over to Rush. lol

Fallon on December 30, 2012 at 12:36 PM

NPR’s shows that deal with history are actually kind of funny when they cover the South or Red States more generally. It’s fun listening to people try to be highly intellectual when they desperately just want to shout “RAAAACISTS! TEA-BAGGERS! JESUS FREAKS! CREATIONISTS!”.

I don’t need to “try” to get the Leftist viewpoints: I’ve been immersed in it my entire life via my local Legacy Media: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Suntimes, Chicago magazine, The Reader, WGN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, etc.
visions on December 30, 2012 at 12:39 PM

It takes a gigantic amount of work to NOT hear Communist propaganda. If you did absolutely nothing but live in a cave and listen to The Rush Limbaugh show, you’d still get the liberal media’s talking points piped into your skull nine times a day.

Douchehat is just mad because he can’t tap into the big numbers the entertainment media have as a more-or-less captive audience for their more-or-less subtle propaganda. Nowadays only an incredibly tiny number of people go out of their way to read editorials from liberal newspapers. And most of them are conservatives, who’ll end up using his insane and idiotic drivel to make fun of him.

Douchehat (stolen from logis) types really make me roll my eyes. Liberals have made demonizing conservative sources an industry. How many times do we get into a ‘debate’ with a liberal who demands sources for our opinion (funny they don’t think they owe us sources for theirs) only to have them unleash a predictable array of ad hominems when we do? And god forbid we use FNC as a source. They all maintain the Media Matters caricature of FNC. No, it’s only ‘legit’ if our source is NYT and even that depends on the author. Live in reality, Douchehat. Don’t even try to lecture us until you do.

Why do they always say we are hypnotized into being conservative by Fox News? Because they mindlessly swallow everything from the New York Times. And maybe the Huffington Post.

When the left proposes reform, that reform is perfect. There is no other strategy than their proposal, so if you oppose that reform, you support the status quo. And of course, it is immoral to oppose perfect reform.

Lifestyles, beliefs, and values of different cultures other than Christian are beautiful and awesome. Lifestyles, beliefs, and values of Christians deserve unbounded hateful mockery.